Yes, suggests a lawsuit from a fired Vatican auditor.
Afired Vatican auditor and his deputy are suing the Holy See for $9.25 million, “alleging they were sacked after discovering financial irregularities,” according to an account by Reuters this week. The auditor, Libero Milone, says that Pope Francis signed off on his firing in 2017 after he exposed graft-ridden Vatican officials.
ROME — On June 19, 2017, the Vatican gendarmes entered the offices of the church’s chief auditor. They confiscated his phone and iPad, threw his papers on the floor and ordered the fire brigade to smash open a locked metal filing cabinet, from which they extracted a document that they said proved he was abusing resources to spy on top Vatican cardinals.
“Now you have to confess,” they demanded, according to the auditor, Libero Milone. Faced, he said, with being thrown in a Vatican jail, Mr. Milone signed resignation papers.
The renewal of a controversial secret deal between the Vatican and China on the joint appointment of bishops has come at an embarrassing moment for the Pope, fanning international criticism of what has been characterised as moral appeasement on the part of the Holy See.
The announcement came on the day that President Xi consolidated his dictatorial powers at the climax of the 20th Chinese Communist Party congress and four days before the reopening of the trial of Cardinal Joseph Zen for helping to fund the legal costs of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.
A 2018 arrangement aims to ease a longstanding divide between an underground flock loyal to the pope and a state-backed official church. Critics say it accommodates Beijing communist government.
China and the Vatican extended a secretive deal regarding the appointment of bishops in the communist country.
Under the agreement, which has never been made public, the Vatican and Beijing agreed jointly to appoint bishops but Pope Francis has the final say.
The deal was signed in September 2018 and is still provisional but has been renewed twice.
“The Vatican Party is committed to continuing a respectful and constructive dialogue with the Chinese Party for a productive implementation of the Accord and further development of bilateral relations, with a view to fostering the mission of the Catholic Church and the good of the Chinese people,” the Holy See Press Office said on Saturday.
Why so many Catholics are leaving.
Pope Francis recently called for a “Church open to everyone.” Nothing new here. The Church has always been open to everyone—including sinners. The Church has always acknowledged that it is “a Church of sinners.”
But when Francis says “open to everyone” he seems to have something else in mind. Traditionally, when Catholics spoke of a “Church of sinners” it was understood to mean repentant sinners: people who were sorry for their sins and were trying their best to sin no more.
What is holy about encouraging people to break just laws?
For decades, the U.S. Catholic bishops have operated like open-borders activists, hectoring Republican politicians for not supporting illegal immigration. Before the sexual abuse scandal erupted in the Church, the bishops were insufferable on this subject. After the scandal, some of them toned down their moralizing in recognition that they had lost any credibility as experts on “justice.” But now they’re back to the cocky clericalism of the 1980s, squandering their authority on a prudential political matter clearly beyond it. They routinely portray support for illegal immigration as “Catholic teaching.” But it isn’t. The Church has never officially taught that it is “unjust” for a country’s leaders to enforce immigration laws.
As Hong Kong puts the bishop on trial, Francis still offers no support.
It was a Saturday morning in July 1997, one week after Hong Kong was handed back to China. Cardinal Joseph Zen was waiting inside the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, all smiles. He was there to baptize his friend and the founder of Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai. I was there as Jimmy’s godfather.
We were a happy little band that day. But today, 25 years later, Jimmy has been imprisoned. And 90-year old Cardinal Zen, who was arrested in May by national-security police, is about to be put on trial.
h/t YG
And misled Christians in the process.
In the late 1930s Catholic historian Hillaire Belloc wrote:
It [Islam] is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…
It seemed an unlikely prediction. At the time, the Islamic world was practically moribund. A comeback did not seem to be in the cards. Yet, Belloc was proved right. Within four decades, Islam was once again a power to be reckoned with.
VATICAN CITY, Aug 18 (Reuters) – Pope Francis has decided there is not sufficient evidence to open a Church investigation into Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet over allegations of sexual assault, the Vatican said in a statement on Thursday.
For a Church that was always regarded as “unchangeable,” the impossible has happened.
There seems little doubt that the Roman Catholic Church in 2022 is on a mission to destroy itself.
For a Church that was always regarded as “unchangeable,” the impossible happened.
The Second Vatican Council, thought to bring a new Pentecost to the Church, did the opposite. It emptied convents, seminaries and monasteries. It changed the liturgy in a radical way so as to make the Mass unrecognizable from what it had been for centuries.
Hate crime reports in Canada surged during COVID-19 pandemic: StatCan
Hate crimes reported by police are on the rise in Canada amid the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdowns and other virus-related measures disrupted everyday life.
A new report released by Statistics Canada on Tuesday showed that 3,360 hate crimes were reported by police last year, representing a 27 per cent increase compared with 2020 and a 72 per cent jump over the span of two years.
You have to love how the surge wasn’t even mentioned by Trudeau’s lackey press. I have no doubt it was in large part due to Trudeau’s tacit approval.
How many prosecutions have their been? Over 50 churches burned at last count.
A member of the National Indian Residential School Circle of Survivors says it’s good Pope Francis acknowledged that what happened in the schools amounted to genocide, but that he should have said it before he left Canada.
Ken Young, who is the former Manitoba regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, says he believes the Pope failed to make the acknowledgment during his Canadian visit last week because Canadian Catholic officials failed to brief him properly.
The Pope’s visit to Canada and apology for the role of many church members in Canada’s residential school system has sparked intense discussion over the extent of that apology, its impact for Indigenous peoples and the question: what should be the next priority in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action?
An apology from the Pope was call 58 by the TRC. But many felt what was actually said this week didn’t go far enough, and one of those people is Murray Sinclair, the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Pope Francis’s apology for the Catholic Church’s role in Indigenous residential schools in Canada has raised questions about whether he would formally rescind the church’s Doctrine of Discovery.
The doctrine, dating back to the 15th century, included a series of edicts known as papal bulls, that were later used to justify colonizing Indigenous lands.
But any hesitation by the Pope to renounce it may stem from the Vatican’s view that the church has already done away with and replaced those edicts, some observers suggest.
QUEBEC CITY (AP) — The Canadian government made clear Wednesday that Pope Francis’ apology to Indigenous peoples for abuses in the country’s church-run residential schools didn’t go far enough, suggesting that reconciliation over the fraught history is still very much a work in progress.
The official government reaction came as Francis arrived in Quebec City for meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Mary Simon at her Quebec residence, the hilltop Citadelle fortress, on the second leg of Francis’ week-long visit to Canada.
The government’s criticisms echo those of some survivors and concern Francis’ omission of any reference to the sexual abuse suffered by Indigenous children in the schools, as well as his original reluctance to name the Catholic Church as an institution bearing responsibility.
